After nearly two decades away from the Covent Garden stage, it was time Britten's Billy Budd came home, in a new production from Madrid by Deborah Warner.
Oper Frankfurt's revival of Richard Jones's production of Billy Budd with a homegrown cast is a devastating combination of powerful music and searing drama.
Opera North's production of Benjamin Britten's Billy Budd, directed by Orpha Phelan, is a tense psychological drama which puts the emphasis on issues of democracy and attitudes to dictatorship.
“It is not his trial, it is mine, mine. It is I whom the devil awaits.” Richard Croft's Vere leads an outstanding cast in LA Opera's revival of Billy Budd.
This BAM production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd, imported from Glyndebourne, achieves the rare distinction of making a great performance out of a decidedly mediocre work.
The silence at the end of the concert said it all. To have plunged the attention of the entire Royal Albert Hall into utter silence for a whole minute after the music has finished was an impressive feat. Such was the audience response to Mark Padmore’s closing walk down the back of the stage, as Captain Vere.
You can view Britten’s Billy Budd as an opera about the failure of words. When the angelic sailor Billy is falsely accused by his superior office Claggart, his stammer prevents him from defending himself and he lashes out, fatally.
For a taut drama about the relationships between men thrown together in an enclosed space, it's hard to imagine a better setting than the claustrophobic environment of a warship in Nelson's navy.
